3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Josh Earnest doesn't think these kinds of graphs paint the whole picture of the Obama recovery. So it's all wrong. What we need is full nationalization of America's universities, because education is a right, not just for the rich. Obama needs a new enemy. Climate, Republicans, Israel, police, Catholic Church, whites, capitalism... it just won't be enough. The Great Uniter! More! Forward! -$$$

Never fear, we're only 16 months away from President Trump and then we'll Make America Great Again!

Unfortunately without a democratic president to encourage gun and ammo sales, we might have a small slump there. But Trump has a plan there too. Once we have a national "conceal and carry" policy, people will want to bring them everywhere, and we just need a little marketing, perhaps a gun color coordinated for every outfit?

But I wish Tyler Durden's charts would have included this one, 7-years of near zero Effective Federal Funds Rate for interbank loans.https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DFF

And this is an interesting article, an implicit "third mandate" for the federal reserve, the first two mandates are to keep inflation and unemployement low.http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/18/a-third-mandate-for-fed-as-china-worries-take-hold.html--------"The Federal Reserve's third mandate appears to be global financial stability," Mark Haefele, global chief investment officer at UBS Wealth Management, said in a note.

"The U.S. central bank has backed away from its first rate rise in over nine years, saying that international economic and financial weakness could dampen activity in the U.S.," he said. --------

So the trick apparently is "flight to safety" means the U.S. dollar gets stronger the worse the rest of the world gets. So the theory is if the Fed increased the target interest rate, the dollar gets tighter, and its value goes UP in exchange rates, and our products and services becomes less competitive internationally, and companies end up laying off workers and opening offices in other countries where their currencies are weaker.

So strangely we just can't "print" dollars (via new loans) fast enough to cause (core) inflation at the moment. And if new loans slow down, the dollar just gets stronger, and we become less competitive and lose more jobs, so the federal reserve has this new implicit mandate to not allow the dollar to get too strong. (Perhaps we can call it the zeroth mandate?)

Anyway, we need a president who can explain all this to the America people, so we'll know whether to cheer or boo when these economic indicators go up or down or both at the same time.

It would be cute if Trump used some of his billions to buy up TV air time to present us with nerdy charts and figures like Ross Perot in 1992.